Wednesday, June 20, 2007

No doubt hoping to score another knockout along the lines of their 2005 hit "The Chronicles of Narnia," Walt Disney Pictures produced "Bridge to Terabithia" in 2007. Based on the 1977 Newbery Medal-winning children's novel by Katherine Paterson, "Bridge" features young people in the leading roles and both real and imaginary worlds. The result is a reasonably good family film, but it's no "Narnia," being far more grim and a whole lot less fantastical. Still, the story contains much meaning for children, and the young actors are a delight.

Here's the thing: Authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis may have written their books about young people, but they intended them for adults as well as youngsters. Clearly, Ms. Paterson wrote her story about young people for youngsters alone. Keep that in mind, and "Terabithia" works on its own terms, at least for the first three-quarters of its running time. For adults, it may be a much longer ordeal.

The story concerns a fifth-grade boy, Jesse Aarons (Josh Hutcherson), who lives with his family in a rural area of the country. Jesse has trouble getting along with his family, and he has trouble getting along with the other children at school. Then, a new girl, Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb), and her parents move into a house near Jesse's, and she, too, has trouble adjusting to her new school. Jesse and Leslie soon become friends, perhaps through their mutual misery, and Leslie teaches Jesse how to escape their problems by creating an imaginary world, the kingdom of Terabithia, in the forest behind their homes. The more they imagine, the more they see, and the more they see, the happier they are together.

The movie's two leads, Hutcherson and Robb, greatly enhance the story line. They are not only persuasive actors, they make cute, charming, immensely appealing characters. Even when I found the story line bogging down in banalities, I found Hutcherson and Robb lifted it above the mundane.

More important, for a child the film offers a wealth of insight and meaning. It is a story that can teach much about growing up, about coming of age and learning great life lessons, about the value of friendship, about the significance of family, about the need for dreams, and about the power of imagination in helping to overcome hardships.

I also enjoyed the movie's visual appeal, its attractive location shooting in the backwoods of New Zealand, and its subdued but effective CGI work. This is not an FX spectacular, but what few special effects the film requires in order to create its imaginary world, it provides quite well.

However, from an adult's perspective, I found the film lacking in the very creativity that its story line promotes. For one thing, we get to see very little of the world of Terabithia. For a film I expected might be another "Narnia," this one has maybe five or ten minutes total of fantasy in it, all of it imagined by the children. The script securely anchors the rest of the plot in the here and now of an all-too-ordinary reality.

I also found most of the characters either lacking in development or downright stereotyped. Case in point: The movie tells us that Jesse is a loner and that many of the kids in school deride and bully him. When the bus picks him up for the first day back to school, the kids on the bus taunt him, calling him a farm boy. Yet there seems no logical reason for anyone's behavior. The children who ridicule Jesse as a farm boy, for instance, have little reason for doing so, given that the bus is picking them up in the countryside, too. It doesn't make much sense.

And why is Jesse such a loner? Usually, it is because a person is an only child or because a person is different in some way--smarter, dumber, shorter, taller--than everyone else. But Jesse is a good-looking boy of more than average intelligence, creativity, and athleticism. He does nothing to provoke the other children, yet they torment him. Are we to believe that he goes to a school filled with the most horrible little cretins on the planet?

Or does the film intend for us to believe that this is a child's story told from a child's point of view? If that were the case, then we could easily believe that Jesse was merely inflating the problems he sees around him. Yet there is nothing in the plot or characterizations that might lead us to think this is the case. Jesse does not narrate the story; we see it through the eyes of an unseen and omniscient observer. Thus, we must accept everything we see as being the way it is, something I found difficult to do.

Another example: Jesse's father works in a hardware store in town; he is not a "farmer." But because he is a blue-collar worker, the story tells us he is having trouble making ends meet, and he's grouchy all the time. Additionally, Jesse thinks his father likes his little sister, May Belle (Bailee Madison), more than he likes him. On the other hand, Leslie's parents are both writers, novelists, and she and her family are all happy, free spirits. It seems a shame that the plot should encourage the idea that more-intellectual people are happier than those folks possessing less-intellectual gifts or performing more-menial labor.

I really shouldn't even mention Jesse's school, but as a former schoolteacher of almost forty years, I can't help myself. I mean, why must movies always picture schools either as dilapidated, graffiti-covered hell holes or, as here, as pristine places of higher learning, without a shred of paper on the floor or mark on a desktop? Why must the English teacher (Jen Wolfe) be a tyrant? Why must the school bus driver be an idiot? Why must the music teacher (Zooey Deschanel) be sweet and fun, doing nothing all day but leading the children in joyful songs? And why must Jesse attend the only school in the world where nobody supervises the school yard, where older girl bullies can charge admission to lines of younger girls to use the restroom without any of the school's personnel noticing? Only in the movies, eh?

No doubt hoping to score another knockout along the lines of their 2005 hit "The Chronicles of Narnia," Walt Disney Pictures produced "Bridge to Terabithia" in 2007. Based on the 1977 Newbery Medal-winning children's novel by Katherine Paterson, "Bridge" features young people in the leading roles and both real and imaginary worlds. The result is a reasonably good family film, but it's no "Narnia," being far more grim and a whole lot less fantastical. Still, the story contains much meaning for children, and the young actors are a delight.

Here's the thing: Authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis may have written their books about young people, but they intended them for adults as well as youngsters. Clearly, Ms. Paterson wrote her story about young people for youngsters alone. Keep that in mind, and "Terabithia" works on its own terms, at least for the first three-quarters of its running time. For adults, it may be a much longer ordeal.

The story concerns a fifth-grade boy, Jesse Aarons (Josh Hutcherson), who lives with his family in a rural area of the country. Jesse has trouble getting along with his family, and he has trouble getting along with the other children at school. Then, a new girl, Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb), and her parents move into a house near Jesse's, and she, too, has trouble adjusting to her new school. Jesse and Leslie soon become friends, perhaps through their mutual misery, and Leslie teaches Jesse how to escape their problems by creating an imaginary world, the kingdom of Terabithia, in the forest behind their homes. The more they imagine, the more they see, and the more they see, the happier they are together.

The movie's two leads, Hutcherson and Robb, greatly enhance the story line. They are not only persuasive actors, they make cute, charming, immensely appealing characters. Even when I found the story line bogging down in banalities, I found Hutcherson and Robb lifted it above the mundane.

More important, for a child the film offers a wealth of insight and meaning. It is a story that can teach much about growing up, about coming of age and learning great life lessons, about the value of friendship, about the significance of family, about the need for dreams, and about the power of imagination in helping to overcome hardships.

I also enjoyed the movie's visual appeal, its attractive location shooting in the backwoods of New Zealand, and its subdued but effective CGI work. This is not an FX spectacular, but what few special effects the film requires in order to create its imaginary world, it provides quite well.

However, from an adult's perspective, I found the film lacking in the very creativity that its story line promotes. For one thing, we get to see very little of the world of Terabithia. For a film I expected might be another "Narnia," this one has maybe five or ten minutes total of fantasy in it, all of it imagined by the children. The script securely anchors the rest of the plot in the here and now of an all-too-ordinary reality.

I also found most of the characters either lacking in development or downright stereotyped. Case in point: The movie tells us that Jesse is a loner and that many of the kids in school deride and bully him. When the bus picks him up for the first day back to school, the kids on the bus taunt him, calling him a farm boy. Yet there seems no logical reason for anyone's behavior. The children who ridicule Jesse as a farm boy, for instance, have little reason for doing so, given that the bus is picking them up in the countryside, too. It doesn't make much sense.

And why is Jesse such a loner? Usually, it is because a person is an only child or because a person is different in some way--smarter, dumber, shorter, taller--than everyone else. But Jesse is a good-looking boy of more than average intelligence, creativity, and athleticism. He does nothing to provoke the other children, yet they torment him. Are we to believe that he goes to a school filled with the most horrible little cretins on the planet?

Or does the film intend for us to believe that this is a child's story told from a child's point of view? If that were the case, then we could easily believe that Jesse was merely inflating the problems he sees around him. Yet there is nothing in the plot or characterizations that might lead us to think this is the case. Jesse does not narrate the story; we see it through the eyes of an unseen and omniscient observer. Thus, we must accept everything we see as being the way it is, something I found difficult to do.

Another example: Jesse's father works in a hardware store in town; he is not a "farmer." But because he is a blue-collar worker, the story tells us he is having trouble making ends meet, and he's grouchy all the time. Additionally, Jesse thinks his father likes his little sister, May Belle (Bailee Madison), more than he likes him. On the other hand, Leslie's parents are both writers, novelists, and she and her family are all happy, free spirits. It seems a shame that the plot should encourage the idea that more-intellectual people are happier than those folks possessing less-intellectual gifts or performing more-menial labor.

I really shouldn't even mention Jesse's school, but as a former schoolteacher of almost forty years, I can't help myself. I mean, why must movies always picture schools either as dilapidated, graffiti-covered hell holes or, as here, as pristine places of higher learning, without a shred of paper on the floor or mark on a desktop? Why must the English teacher (Jen Wolfe) be a tyrant? Why must the school bus driver be an idiot? Why must the music teacher (Zooey Deschanel) be sweet and fun, doing nothing all day but leading the children in joyful songs? And why must Jesse attend the only school in the world where nobody supervises the school yard, where older girl bullies can charge admission to lines of younger girls to use the restroom without any of the school's personnel noticing? Only in the movies, eh?

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